Israeli warplanes nearly shot down an American airliner carrying passengers from Newark, N.J., to Tel Aviv yesterday when the pilot failed to respond as the plane approached the Israeli coast, an airport authority official said. Two Israeli F-15 and two F-16 fighter planes were scrambled to intercept a Boeing 777 operated by Continental Airlines as it prepared to enter Israeli airspace without responding to control tower demands to identify itself, the official added. According to Israel's private Channel-10, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and Gen. Gaby Ashkenazy, the military chief of staff, were warned that the air force was on the point of shooting down a civilian plane suspected of being in the hands of hijackers. ... http://www.washingtontimes.com

Sameh Amira was fast asleep when he was jolted awake by pounding at the front door. Israeli troops were on a manhunt for wanted militants in the West Bank and decided to draft help. The terror-stricken 24-year-old Palestinian soon found himself forced onto the front lines of Israel’s shadowy war against militants, a human shield as he led heavily armed soldiers from house to house. “I was afraid I would die,” he said in a recent interview. For several years, Palestinians had complained about the army’s use of human shields, but proof was difficult to come by. Then in late February, Associated Press Television News captured footage of the incident involving Amira. The video has prompted the army to launch a rare criminal investigation into whether its soldiers violated a landmark Israeli Supreme Court 2005 ruling barring the use of human shields. Others, including an 11-year-old girl, have been ...http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18058725/

Four years after the fall of Baghdad, the White House is once again struggling to solve an old problem: Who is in charge of carrying out policy in Iraq? Once again President Bush and his top aides are searching for a high-level coordinator capable of cutting through military, political and reconstruction strategies that have never operated in sync, in Washington or in Baghdad. Once again Mr. Bush is publicly declaring that his administration has settled on a strategy for victory — this time, a troop increase that is supposed to open political space for Sunnis and Shiites to live and govern together — even while his top aides acknowledge that the White House has never gotten the execution right. “We’re trying to learn from our experience,” Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said in an interview on Wednesday. Confirming a report that first appeared in The Washington Post, Mr. Hadley said he had been sounding out retired military commanders to ...http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/world/middleeast/12policy.html?ex=1334030400&en=6000b64f9dc27a9f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

A federal bankruptcy judge Wednesday ordered an external audit of the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego amid accusations church leaders are trying to hide assessts to avoid payment to sex abuse victims. Judge Louise DeCarl Adler had earlier threatened the diocese with contempt for misrepresenting facts and possibly violating bankruptcy laws. She criticized church attorneys for failing to include 770 parish accounts in bankruptcy documents. "This is the most Byzantine accounting system I've ever seen," Adler said. "I am mystified." The contempt threat Monday came six weeks after the diocese sought bankruptcy protection amid lawsuits by more than 140 people who accuse priests of sexual abuse. ...http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=3032658

Nearly two months into a Baghdad security plan intended to calm the Iraqi capital by protecting residents from sectarian violence, Shiite Muslim militia members are still driving Sunni Muslims from religiously mixed neighborhoods. Iraqi soldiers, usually ethnic Kurds, reportedly have intervened in some instances to stop the militia campaign. But interviews with Sunni residents found that most of the efforts go unchallenged in a city where it's increasingly rare for Shiites or Sunnis to remain in neighborhoods that the other sect dominates. Residents displaced in the past four months describe a new effort that haunts them after they flee. It begins with intimidating phone calls, then escalates into bombings or the dismantling of Sunni homes. The residents said the perpetrators were members of the Mahdi Army militia, which is loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Al-Sadr reportedly has told his followers ...http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/17062616.htm

The situation for civilians in Iraq is "ever-worsening," even though security in some places has improved as a result of stepped-up efforts by U.S.-led multinational forces, the international Red Cross said Wednesday. Thousands of bodies lie unclaimed in mortuaries, with family members either unaware that they are there or too afraid to go to recover them, according to a key official with the neutral agency. Medical professionals also have been fleeing the country after cases where their colleagues were killed or abducted, the group said. "Whatever operation that is today underway, and that may be taken tomorrow and in the weeks after, to improve the security of civilians on the ground may have an effect in the medium term," said Pierre Kraehenbuehl, director of operations of the International Committee of the Red Cross, or ICRC. "We're certainly not seeing an immediate effect in terms of stabilization for civilians currently. That is not our reading," he said....http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2007-04-11-icrc_N.htm